Building a beridge across the Kerch Strait may exceed 100 billion rubles (around $2.8 billion) if an option of two railway tracks on the bridge is chosen, Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov says

The Kerch Strait

MOSCOW, April 02. /ITAR-TASS/. The volume of funding in the project of building a bridge across the Kerch Strait may make 100 billion rubles (around $2.8 billion) and may even exceed this sum, if an option of two railway tracks on the bridge is chosen, Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov told ITAR-TASS on Wednesday.

“The volume of funding will obviously exceed already planned 50 billion rubles (around $1.4 billion), because only a motor bridge was planned. As a new task (a bridge should be motor and railway) is set that, according to our estimates, will cost at least 80-85 billion rubles ($2.2-2.4 billion). If a two-way railway is planned, probably this sum will get quite closely to or will even surpass 100 billion rubles,” Sokolov said.

“This is explainable, because we did not build such long bridges starting from five kilometers and a bridge of ten kilometers long,” he said.